Poets of the Silver Age

The end of the old age and the beginning of a new, contradictory era of decline and flowering - this is the time that generates geniuses. Prominent poets of the Silver Age: Osip Mandelstam, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Maximilian Voloshin, Vladislav Khodasevich, Andrei Bely, Innokenty Annensky, Igor Severyanin, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Nikolai Gumilev and many others, Discrepancies between opinions on the prospects for the development of Russian philosophical thought, religion, and their influence on art. However, over time, all these names have merged for us into a single symbol of a beautiful and turbulent era. Their work began to be denoted by a single concept - "the poets of the Silver Age". Not every one of our contemporaries will understand what is the fundamental difference between the concepts of the philosophy of art of that time, and why they got such a sonorous general name.

The concept of the "Silver Age" associates us with the poetry of the "Golden Age" - the first third of the 19th century, when Alexander Pushkin and his classmates worked at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. These rebels and upstarts (in the eyes of respectable citizens) turned out to be geniuses that transformed the cultural and political face of Russia. The heirs of this grandiose revolution were the Russian poets of the Silver Age. But if the creators of the Pushkin era gave birth to a new form of Russian literature, they created a harmonious modern language, then at the end of the 19th century, art people attempted to internalize the word, began to experiment with meaning and sound, trying to penetrate the secret secrets of the language, its psychological essence, the secrets of emotional influence .

Tense struggle, a sense of decline and a hope for a revival, a challenge to outdated traditions, the search for new ways of artistic expression, interest in taboo subjects, occultism, religion, mysticism - all these were tried to reflect the poets of the silver age in their work. A new awakening of Russia, a premonition of a catastrophe, a passionate desire to live and a sense of hopelessness gave rise to unprecedented forms of poetic art. The destructive large-scale war in which chemical weapons were involved cast doubt on the main value - the sanctity of human life, thereby undermining all moral principles.

European democratic revolutions, a series of revolutionary events within Russia, partly provoked, partly were themselves formed by new cultural and philosophical trends. Modernism in art became a reflection of the spiritual world of people of that era, and poets of the silver age expressed in amazing poems the self-awareness of a man who was afraid of being crushed by the technogenic progress hydra. The light appeared Dadaism - one of the popular currents of the time. E.Golyshev, V.Kandinsky - the followers of Hugo Bal, who appeared on the stage in a suit of trimming an aluminum pipe and read rhythmic and meaningless sets of letter combinations, sacredly believed that the new time does not require the use of old words - technological progress destroyed the harmony of meaning and Sound, henceforth every spoken sound will affect the human emotions and that's enough. So there were poems in the style of "yes-yes."

The categorical denial of former values and the incessant spiritual pain forced new poets to seek solace in a world of fantasies and symbols. Symbolists of the silver age (O. Mandelstam, A. Blok, A. Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva) believed in the power of the word and denied the influence of progress on literature. With their verses they asserted the idea that only by plunging into their inner world and finding there symbols that express the eternal ideas of God, Soul, Love and Death, one can be reborn to a new life.

The silver age of Russian poetry can not be considered a chronological period in which only one new literary trend was formed. This is the epoch of a powerful intellectual upsurge, which gave rise to many concepts of the development of art: acmeism, futurism, imaginism, Dadaism, new peasant poetry, etc. All of them significantly influenced the formation of new art, changing perceptions of the place of man in the world, Progress, God and Soul .